Meta

Month: August 2005

Yesterday a couple of packages arrived in the mail from O’Reilly. Each one had a copy of Web Site Measurement Hacks. When author Eric Peterson asked me if I’d be willing to write up a hack on using network sniffing, I said sure! At least I can contribute something I know a little bit about. Eric promised it would be a hands-on guide, not some philosophical treatise.

The book fulfills its promise, worthy of the O’Reilly Hacks series name. It’s information-dense, with lots of practical advice, and good tricks of the trade. All told, there are 100 hacks here, with contributions from an all-star cast of vendors and practitioners.

Eric did a great thing in naming this book. First, he positioned it correctly — this is about measurement & reporting, not analysis. Second, he set the stage for a couple more books. My crystal ball might say that the next logical book would be on metrics and KPIs, and then on to real analytics as marketers might use them — funnel analysis, SEO/SEM, customer acquisition, churn, retention, engagement — perhaps with side stops for things like A/B testing, segmentation, targeting, etc.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. If you love web data, you’ll like this book. Our little bundle of joy is growing up!

If you’ve seen my About page, you know I don’t pay attention to my blog stats. I mean, I do care about visitors and referrers. I get referrer info from places like PubSub, so they show up in my RSS reader. I don’t really care about visitors as much as I care about participants. If you comment, via my blog, your blog, or email, or hit me up in person, that’s enough for me.

However — that’s not true for many bloggers. They invest a lot of themselves, and want to see a return on their investment, even it’s just the satisfaction that they are reaching an audience.

At the Search Engine Strategies conference a couple of weeks ago, I got a sneak peak at an early-stage project for tracking and reporting on blogs. Between then and now, a number of blog-tracking related projects have emerged, in one form or another. For example, there’s

Well, I see that after a long slumber, A List Apart is back, with a new look and a new outlook. So I’m back too.

I updated to the latest version of WordPress, and changed the look of the blog. That default was ready for a change. There are dozens of things about the new look that I want to change, and there are some outright problems with it — but I only have so many hours in the day. If you’re reading via RSS, the only thing to note is that you’re missing a sidebar of photos from Flickr.

I hung out with some web analytics folks who were attending SES in San Jose; even got my picture taken with Ram Srinivasan of FireClick:

I watched as Yahoo! Search announced they had tons more stuff in their index, while others tried to prove they didn’t (with some amazingly bad methodology, if I may say) and only ended up proving that Yahoo prunes spam pages better than G. One of the Yahoo engineers responsible for extending and validating the new index was amused.

I prepared (and delivered) too many presentations. I got the book Beyond Bullet Points, and read the associated blog but I can’t say I really applied the concepts .. always preparing presentations on deadline – no time to do the up-front design required. But I like the book anyway.

I stopped reading blogs for a few weeks, and realized that I wasn’t missing much. I fired up my RSS newsreader (NetNewsWire) and retired about half of the blogs I was reading. I’m under 190 feeds now, many which I ignore except for maybe a monthly check-in.